#< for the trans femicide mention

[amissingbrick]

Going into teaching I was ready for many things, but having kids police my gender was definitely not one of them.

Look, I’m a cis woman with long natural colored hair, and the way I dress doesn’t matter bc I have to wear an uniform anyway. I don’t have any piercings or tattoos. I thought I looked just like any other cishet coworker of mine.

But these 5yo find scandalous that I don’t wear earrings, or that I have short nails with no nail polish, or -shock!- that I have body hair. And not on any parts that people usually feel necessary to shave, like legs or armpits (these are covered by the uniform) or the mustache (still wearing a mask): it’s my arms.

It worries me a lot because I work in a preppy preschool. These are the children of the high middle class and up. In a country that can’t go 4 decades without a fascist dictatorship. In the country that kills the most trans women. And in this capitalist society, kids learning these kinds of prejudices -when I thought we were dismantling it all- will be the ones with the upper hand.

[unhingedfemmecontent]

domestic violence isn't funny

not only was that Matt Riffe joke insanely unfunny it is just also horrifying. i know i am super late to talking about this but i wasn't posting on tublr when it happened

Watching the eyes of the person you thought you where going to spend the rest of your life with go cold as they choke you is an experience i wish on not a single person.

As someone who has gone trough multiple forms of abuse and SA domestic violence crushes your soul in a completely different way (not comparing by how bad they are just how different it is).

20 PEOPLE PER MINUTE ARE PHYSICALLY ABUSED BY AN INTIMATE PARTNER IN THE UNITED STATES

72% OF ALL MURDER SUICIDES INVOLVE AN INTIMATE PARTNER 94% OF THOSE VICTIMS ARE WOMEN

WOMEN MAKE UP 82% OF PEOPLE MURDERED BY AN EX PARTNER

i don't care if you think i'm soft i don't care if you think i can't take a joke ( i joke about my own trauma all the time)

it is not a funny joke and it was most certainly not a funny joke coming from who it came from

[befuddled-calico-whump]

This is a genuine question: I know you enjoy lady whump as you have some characters that are female and are whumpees. I enjoy it too, sorta. Truth is that I feel guilty.

I know it’s kinda problematic to see lady whump as taboo and immoral but I can’t help but feel like it’s wrong, I come from a country that HATES women (shocker all countries hate women but I mean mine has a huge femicide problem) and I know how stupid I sound “I can’t feel but it’s wrong” like duh it’s whump! But I honestly don’t know how to get over those feelings, it hits too close home.

My question here is did you ever got those feelings of guilt and if you did, how did you get over those?

It's understandable to feel guilty at times, especially when creating or enjoying dark content (and especially if it's something that hits close to home)

Initially, I had some reservations about lady whump, since in mainstream media, violence against women tends to be a sensationalized thing that exists for shock value or to motivate the male lead in some way

(it's worth noting that the media has a history of doing this to trans, gay, and otherwise queer characters and non-white characters as well)

Initially I was squicked out by the idea of lady whump because I was so used to seeing it through that lens (not to mention, as you've said, the real-life examples)

However, I've seen again and again that whump as a genre tends to handle that material well (with all genders, not just females). Instead of the shock value, whump focuses a lot on the emotions, how the harm affects the character being harmed, and more often than not gives that character a fulfilling recovery arc

Personally, that's what shifted my opinion on it

Even then, if it's something you're uncomfortable with, you're not at fault for avoiding or disliking it. It all comes down to personal preference, and whether you'd like to explore it more or just stay away, it's your choice, and you shouldn't need to explain yourself (/gen)

[djuvlipen]

https://www.tumblr.com/spacelazarwolf/714184334446313472/terfs-will-whine-that-calling-the-trans-genocide?source=share

The bullshit

the only genocide in north america is like you know.... the ongoing genocides of indigenous people. but they will never ever talk about that and theyll never talk about femicide or how black women and indigenous women are shockingly more likely to be murdered or prostituted

sorry had to rant. its so truely offensive

and the only male traits terfs truely believe in (big noses? come on, like radfems arent anti plastic surgery and pro big nose) are you know... being born with a penis and balls. which isnt a Woman of Color Thing at all and most trans women are white men who look nothing like jewish women or black women or etc just fuck off racists

Oh, gosh, so many things wrong with this.

First of all, you are so right. And the only time they mention the genocide of indigenous people here, is to use it as a gotcha against "terfs" (even though none of us deny that it happened and is currently still happening), which is pretty telling tbh. Transactivists only ever bring up racism and genocide against people of colour to use it as props to push their "trans people are the most oppressed/going through genocide right now", which is pretty annoying.

Second, genocide is not just inflicting harm in order to destroy a "group of people", it is inflicting harm to destroy a group of people because of their nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. As in, genocide has to do first and foremost with racism / racialized hatred (ethnicity, religion and nationality have often been used to define a group as belonging to another race). Erasing the importance of racism when talking about genocide is racist and it's the most 1st world, white thing that you can do.

Like, "TERFs" aren't mad about the "trans genocide" narrative because we think it's offensive to talk about genocides other than the Shoah. We know that genocides are multifaceted, that a genocidal process is always unique, that many people other than Jews suffered genocide. We are mad because erasing the relationship between racism and genocide is racist, and because any politics TRAs disagree with is being turned into a genocide.

If they want to talk about how transphobic these politics are, they could have done so without saying it is a genocide. Not every bad thing in the world is a genocide. Persecution can be bad and still not be a genocide. The fact that any politics that doesn't suit their political agendas reframed as genocidal is stupid, offensive, racist, and it comes off as very overdramatic.

I wish they could spend as much time talking about MMIW and racism against indigenous and black people, as they do talking about the "trans genocide".

[nobleelfwarrior]

In response to This post.

I want to establish a few things before I go on.

people can be both oppressor and oppressed because their are different axes of oppression

witches, anthropologically speaking, are a cultural phenomenon where someone, frequently but not exclusively a woman, is blamed for causing misfortune/bad luck.

I am white, so I'm coming at this from a different perspective from the women in the video.

Now, with that out of the way, European women are oppressed on the basis of the sex. When the European witch trials were underway we have evidence that they were targeting

women who were in medicine so that male doctors could force their way into the field.

women who were outspoken or political

women who owned land

women who were "strange". We would now consider these women disabled, homeless, or chronically ill.

The werewolf trials targeted those same women.

This was a femicide and I think it is insensitive to say white women have no claim to a legacy of witchcraft. This is especially true, because, as I mentioned earlier, witches happen in many cultures. In some parts of Africa today there are witch accusations that result in children and women being stoned to death or fleeing their home and family. I know there are other examples in other cultures if you care to look into that. I didn't know about the magic hair beliefs mentioned in the video I linked, but that is also a good example. In the Salem witch trials one of the first women killed was a slave women of Barbados. It is unclear if she is black or indigenous, but the point that white women were not the only targets of witchcraft is true. Any woman could be targets of witchcraft unless she fell in line with what her society demanded of her. If she didn't, if she resisted, then there were multitudinous painful ways to kill her.

Having said all that, there is definitely a discussion to be had about women who claim to be the "daughters of witches you couldn't burn" while also attacking women like Amber Heard or JK Rowling for not falling in line like they "should". I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that these have been modern day witch trial. These women are blamed for all sorts of misfortunes and perceived wrongs because they didn't bow to men. Where stoning and crushing and hanging and burning are now outlawed, internet threats and canceling and doxxing have had to do for a symbolic execution. Also I consider it appropriation if a trans women were to say that.

The witch trials of Europe and the early Americas have been trivialized and appropriated by men. Salem, MA is a tourist destination with haunted tours. Former President Trump called the investigation against him a "witch hunt" despite ample evidence of actual wrong doing. People write stories about the witch who was hung and now haunts the town. The witches are actually magic in the stories, and evil, instead of what they really were: human women that didn't fit with a man's perfect narrative. Women wanting to put the focus back on the misogyny that perpetrated the genocide is not unreasonable.

I had ancestors in the early North American colonies. Those grandmothers of mine didn't live in Salem, but they would have heard. They would have been afraid. I hope they would have been afraid because they didn't want to become smaller and not because of magic, but I don't know. Looking back on the stories I have of those grandmothers, I know they weren't perfect. I know they were racist, just like all the white people then, and I know I'm not perfect either, but I'm trying, and I can see that they were like me: loud, passionate, angry, forces in their own right and if circumstances had been just a little bit different, they would have burned.

I am the daughter of witches they couldn't kill, and so are you.

[cordycepsfem]

For all the things trans "women" appropriate, it's very telling when you start piecing together the things that they don't. For instance, I've never seen one worry, talk, or even mention breast cancer - something you think they would, considering how much they love talking about their "boobs." But they like the idea of pap smears (even though they don't have a cervix) because it's fun to expose your "lady bits" to people I guess. It's all fun and games, too, to shop for panties and eat chocolate and flirt with boys, but the line quickly gets drawn when it comes to housework, being emotionally supportive to others, raising the children. They love pretending they have periods, but never vaginal prolapse, endometriosis, ovarian cysts. I never hear a peep about pay gaps between men and women. Never a word on the health risks associated with makeup, high heels, or things like scented/bleached menstrual products. Another thing that's always bugged me is the complete disregard for the environment - like, plastic surgery and artificial hormones and the excess clothes and all the trans "official" pride merch (I'm thinking of that random Ikea stuffed shark that so many became obsessed with).... And, like, a woman has never had to buy her way into her identity. She just is. The list goes on, and I grow tired. Perhaps this is all just an unfair rant from a cranky woman, but I can't help it - I see the patterns. "Trans people are who they say they are." But actions speak louder than words. I'm tired.

It’s this weird dichotomy between supporting your “sisters,” not just your “cisters.”

My “cisters” - actual women - here in the US need the things you talk about: research into breast cancer; Pap smears and mammograms; better treatment for disorders that only affect women; help with housework and childcare and getting maternity leave and affordable daycare and good schools for their kids. They need community and feminism to create common goals to work towards. There is actual oppression of women and girls around the globe every day. We can’t buy our way out of it, or take off our identity - our very being - when it doesn’t suit our needs.

My “sisters” - men who are definitely not included in any definition I have of sisterhood - want to be fussed over and worshipped and validated for every breath they take while wearing ill-fitting women’s clothing and mumbling about their fetishes and polycule. They want us to believe that 35-ish trans people dying per year, mostly in ways that could happen to literally anyone, is a genocide, while femicide happens so often that we don’t even recognize it as a hate crime.

For people who want to be accepted as women, they do very little to look to women to figure out how to fit in, how to be a part of a community. Instead they want to come in and take it over, which is an extremely male thing to do.

[sugaroto]

Trigger warning: femicide, rape, transpobia, small description of dead body

It's ironic that for the Panhellenic exams the essay topic was "feminism" and in less than two months two women in Greece have been murdered

One of them, Anastazja (age 27), was probably raped and then murdered. She came from Poland to Greece to work for the summer and her body was found naked close to a lake.

I saw a man on the TV saying she had an "escort app" on her phone, as if this gives men the right to rape and murder her

The murderer was Googling shit like "how to get rid of bodies" and I think he cut/or burned her fingers so they couldn't recognize her. The authorities also found some fucked up shit on his history related to rape- porn.

I dont know much on Anna's (age 46) case but I know she was murdered cause she existed. She came in Greece from Cuba to live free and was murdered cause she was a trans woman. She was found murdered in her apartment. She was wounded probably by a knife

Also since she was found dead, she has mostly been misgendered in media as "man found dead" etc

Also since I mentioned the exams at the beginning, I should add that someone who murdered his wife some years ago was also giving those same exams

Her name was Caroline (age 20) and she was murder by her husband "who was a pilot and a good guy" in their home. She also had a newborn daughter at the time. He planned the whole thing to look like a robbery, even tied himself up and all

[coochiequeens]

Not only are Leicestershire police focusing on this when that area is dealing with actual hate crimes but they are using photos of a model in the advertising might not be getting paid.

Leicestershire Police are under fire for a Twitter post in which they appear to suggest that using an incorrect name for a trans-identified individual could be reported as a “hate crime.”

On October 8, Leicestershire Police’s Stay Safe Twitter account launched a social media campaign advertising Stamp It Out, an anti-hate resource website which provides information on the laws surrounding hate crimes in the area.

Stay Safe, a combined account for the force’s Crime Reduction Officers and Hate Crime Officer, was encouraging social media users to utilize Stamp It Out’s online reporting system in the event they experienced a hate crime.

The campaign’s Twitter posts, of which there were 7 in total, all include a black-and-white graphic with a photo of a person, and a quote in which they described an experience being targeted on the basis of their identity or appearance.

But one of the posts in particular has gone viral for appearing to suggest that calling a transgender person by a non-preferred name would be considered a reportable hate crime.

The graphic featured a photo of a man with long, blond hair, and a quote which read: “I get called by my previous male name on purpose, but that’s not who I am. it can be really hurtful, especially when it’s just seen as a joke.” The quote and photo were attributed to “Jane, 57” of Hinckley. 

Despite purporting to depict a real member of the community, “Jane” is in fact a stock image model who has appeared in dozens of licensable photos across popular stock image websites.

The model was also featured in a “body positive” lingerie campaign in 2015 for Lane Bryant, an American women’s apparel and intimates specialty retailer focusing on plus-size clothing. 

The photos used by Leicestershire Police were taken from a series shot by Arizona-based photographer Anna Griessel. It is unlikely that the model was aware of their likeness being utilized by Leicestershire Police for the campaign, as the rights to stock photos are usually purchased through third-parties.

As of this article’s writing, Leicestershire Police’s post featuring “Jane” has wracked up over 3,000 overwhelmingly negative replies, compared to just 267 ‘likes,’ many of which were ironic. 

Many users in the United Kingdom pointed out that Leicester has seen a massive surge in crime recently, and that the force’s campaign appears to demonstrate misplaced priorities. 

“Leicester has just seen unprecedented unrest and violence, including rioting and looting, on its streets, and there have been numerous reports of sexual assault in the county this year. Fortunately, the police are on the case,” popular UK-based information service @ripx4nutmeg wrote sarcastically.

“You will not compel my speech. Do your real job. 3 women a week in the UK are murdered by men not to mention countless rapes and attacks. Where’s your publicity campaign for them and their children?” User@joolzdenby wrote, referencing femicide statistics which show one woman dies by domestic violence every three days in the United Kingdom.

Responding directly to Leicestershire Police, police watchdog We Are Fair Cop asked: “where is the hate crime here, please?”

Speaking to Reduxx, Dr. Kate Coleman of Keep Prisons Single Sex pointed out that what Leicestershire Police were suggesting was a criminal offense — “deadnaming” a transgender person — was in fact not a legal matter at all.

“A hate crime is a normal crime plus an aggregator. In this case, it would be hostility on the basis of transgender identity,” Dr. Coleman said. “But where is the crime in the example Leicestershire gives There is no crime. So this cannot be a hate crime.”

Coleman is the director of Keep Prisons Single Sex(KPSS), a campaign group focused on advocating for prisons to be segregated by sex, not self-declared gender identity. KPSS is vocal about the rights of women in the UK legal system, and has recently launched a crowdfunder to assist with their activism efforts.

Coleman slammed Leicestershire Police for their apparent lack of insight into the laws they were purporting to enforce, noting that it was a widespread issue in the United Kingdom. She speculated the cause may be that the police have become “institutionally captured” by gender ideology or its proponents.

“Police forces appear to be consistently unaware that in order for a hate crime to be reported, an actual crime must have been committed,” she said. “Hurting someone’s feelings, offending them, upsetting them or making them cry are not crimes. Yet the police are stating that they appear to be willing to act as if they are.”

Despite “misgendering” and “deadnaming” not being crimes in the United Kingdom, multiple women have been arrested or threatened with arrest on those grounds.

In 2019, a mother in Hertfordshire was arrested in front of her children and held for over 7 hours after being reported for “misgendering” a man who identified as a woman on Twitter. Kate Scottow’s conviction was ultimately overturned on appeal the next year, but was just one of many similar cases that would emerge. 

Coleman expresses cautious optimism for the state of free speech rights in the United Kingdom, but stresses that many women are still concerned about being arrested and possibly charged for expressing factually accurate statements related to biology or gender ideology.

“I firmly believe that our determination to fight on will continue. Each day more people, men as well as women, realize the extent of this threat to freedom of speech. I am optimistic, but it would not surprise me if police forces double-down before things improve.”

The backlash against Leicestershire Police comes just weeks after a similar incident in Sussex. 

The Sussex Police force came under fire after a series of posts cautioning Twitter users who were “misgendering” a serial pedophile named in one of their case updates. Taken by many to be a thinly-veiled threat of criminalization, some users asked if they could be charged if they continued to refer to the predator as a “man.” Sussex Police replied to those users with a link to their website outlining the nature of a hate crime, and encouraging people to ensure their “gender critical views” were “not targeted at an individual.”

Sussex Police ultimately retracted the tweets and apologized after widespread outrage.

By Anna Slatz Anna is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief at Reduxx, with a journalistic focus on covering crime, child predators, and women's rights. She lives in Canada, enjoys Opera, and kvetches in her spare time.

This what the cops should be focusing on

[cuntess-carmilla]

This isn't a post where I complain about the flaws of 1st world feminism or any of that, I mean this as a stance of solidarity as women:

(White) 1st world feminists should start looking at what Latine feminists are doing regarding fighting femicides.

The bills we've managed to make our states pass, the activism we're doing, the networks of tangible support we're creating, and the political discourse we've managed to bring to the mainstream, including an acknowledgement of how lesbians and trans women are at a very high risk of murder motivated by gendered factors which is why the terms "lesbicide", "transfemicide" and "travesticide" are used widely here rather than being obscure terms that only the most online or academic feminists use, not to mention our movements having a much more widely spread understanding of the role that state violence/control plays in all of this.

I've made posts in the past about how most of American feminism acts like femicides are a thing of the 3rd world and not something that happens in the US too. A friend of mine who's Chilean but has lived in Austria and Holland tells me that, with the exception of Spain, in Europe this is usually the same as in the US, even though she keeps hearing of more and more cases there too.

Femicide is a problem wherever the patriarchy is a problem. Not addressing it won't solve anything, it'll only keep protecting the perpetrators alongside your images as developed countries.

In the case of the US and Canada specifically; I know American and Canadian white women love to pretend that the issues of Indigenous women are not Women's Issues, but the cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in the stolen lands you stand in IS an issue of (racialized) femicides. Even if you want to act like Gabby Petito's heartbreaking case is an isolated incident of femicide being committed against white North American women (it isn't btw), you still owe it to Indigenous women to care about their femicides too, since not only are they women too, but also it's the men from your racialized communities committing these femicides most of the time.

I know it's not easy and it's scary. It being difficult and scary is why I suggest you look at what Latine feminists have been doing for decades; in México, in Chile, in Argentina, in the Caribbean, in Brazil... This isn't a copyrighted fight, you can look at what we've done, our different strategies, our successes and our failures, and learn from us. I promise you we want nothing but for all women to be safe everywhere. You just have to be humble enough to 1) admit that this problem isn't exclusive to the 3rd world, and 2) be willing to learn from Latin American women.

[laukora1030]

Hey, I rarely write shit here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about women's situation in Mexico, because they're killing us. So, trigger warning, I'm gonna be mentioning death and rape, so please don't read if those topics trigger you.

I think last year I wrote about March 9, I'll explain in a little bit what that's about.

So, basically 9 women are found dead every single day in Mexico. And the government does nothing. It's scary as fuck, to be honest. To think that at any moment I can loose my mom, my sister, my cousins, aunts and friends, to think that at any given moment I can get kidnapped, raped and then killed, I'm scared.

And man, fuck the government, who does little to help us, fuck the police, who everytime women are manifestating they apprehend a few of them, act like they've been arrested, keep them uncommunicated, on very little clothes, humiliate them and, well, I don't know what else.

This year we have governor elections, and the president's party is choosing who they want as a candidate for Guerrero, his name's Félix Salgado Macedonio. He's a fucking rapist. He has three rape complaints (not completely sure that's how you say it in English) and what does the president do? He goes ahead and say that those are fake, that the women asking him to not let this fucking rapist be a candidate are making everything up and that they were sent by other parties to discredit him. I'm disgusted by this. God, I hate it.

And, because women aren't quiet anymore, everyday fighting for their rights not to be groped, raped and killed, and for the right to choose over their own bodies, the president is scared that women will paint the monuments, including the equivalent of the White House, with phrases about how we're being killed daily, the president did this

He shielded his palace (that's how it's called, fucking bs). Of course, women are amazing and they did this

Today during the protest they wrote victims of femicide and the names of women who have been killed just because they're women, while projecting on the palace's wall things like a rapist won't be a governor, and México femicidal.

I honestly think it was so fucking powerful. My sisters shouldn't be suffering for being born women, and we won't stop until we're heard.

And now, about the 9, well. Between the end of 2019 and the beginning of last year a feminist collective called "Las Brujas del Mar" said that if we stopped, so would the whole world. They created this thing call El Paro Nacional: Un Día Sin Nosotras, were no woman, teenage girl or little girl would go to work or school, to show Mexico what would happen if we all disappeared. They said Mexico would loose money, and they did: that day, Mexico lost 13 thousand, 571 millions of pesos. We're doing it again this year.

On March 9th, no woman will leave their homes. We won't cook, won't buy things, won't leave our houses, we won't spend time on social media, because we're "not going to be alive", that's the whole point of El Paro. Showing the men in Mexico that they need us alive. And it's painful that not everyone understands that.

But yeah, that's all, thanks for reading everything I had to say, I needed to get it out of my system.

Just, remember that us women have to stand up for each other, never bring us down, and fight for us and for all of our sisters, including our trans sisters, and to never let the patriarchy win, because we're stronger together. I love you all, take care of yourselves 💜💚💜💚

[starberry-cupcake]

Free Short Stories: Aromantic Recommendations

Aro week is over but I spent it reading aro stories that are entirely accessible online (with their authors' consent) and thought I'd share some with you, as well as some extra resources. I’m going to include under “read more” content warnings and specific details, like the kind of rep included or important notes, so if you want to be sure and safe before reading them, you can click “read more” for all that information, or if you prefer just the blurb, avoid it easily enough. There you will also find the extra links of interest and other masterposts.

Edit: This post used to be split in two parts, I’ve integrated them into one whole post for everyone’s convenience. 

1. Nkásht ii by Darcie Little Badger

Josie and Annie set to investigate a strange death that may involve more than they expected. Sometimes the love that heals isn’t romantic and bonds that are strong are those chosen.

2. Hope of the Future by Elizabeth Barrette

In a fantasy setting, a human cleric finds an elf bard and a strong female dwarf, all cast aside for their identities, and create their own home and family. The same characters also appear in another poem that continued their story: The Underground Gardens.

3. Tanith’s Sky by Penny Stirling

Ash is left with the loss of Tanith, after she sacrifices herself to save the world. Tanith's memories resurface in people's minds and Ash has to navigate their identity, their memories and how to label for others’ sake their lost relationship.

4. And If The Body Were Not The Soul by A. C. Wise

Ro is a human who forms an unlikely bond with an alien refugee, discovering a different layer of proximity that doesn't chain to the type of physicality humanity sets. In that process of discovery, Ro learns about the other side of the social oppression in their own city.

5. The Crows Her Dragon’s Gate by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

An exploration of the background and re-telling of the story of the goddess Xihe. Marrying out of the obligation of customs and pressure, this story explores the feelings of Xihe, her relationship with Di Jun and the freedom she ultimately seeks.

6. The Girl Turns West by Darcie Little Badger

Another tale set in Native American culture (the author is a Lipan Apache writer), this story is about family, sacrifice and forms of non romantic love and devotion that transcend the limits of life and death.

7. Kin, Painted by Penny Stirling

The narrator can’t find a place in a family that seems so determined, so certain, painted each in a specific way. A poetic prose filled with magic and the colors that we paint ourselves with, which can sometimes change with time.

8. Cucumber by Penny Stirling

A queerplatonic couple in a fantasy setting deals with social pressure in a story written in poetic verse.

9. The Famine King by Darcie Little Badger

A woman is chased by fear, memories and a being that affects her relationship with her own identity and mental health, while finding refuge in a found family. These characters are also included in a previous story called To Sleep.

10. How My Best Friend Rania Crashed A Party And Saved The World by Ada Hoffman

Emma, a Relator, finds out that her best friend Rania, a World Saver, is being used by her boyfriend and can lose her credibility as a Hero for it, so she enlists a tech-savvy Number Fiend, Deborah, to crash a high school party in a forbidden sector to confront the guy.

11. Unlike Most Tides by Darcie Little Badger

Mathilda is in peace with her solitude until she communicates with energy beyond her understanding and finds the voice of a murdered woman who asks her for help to deal with her killer: her ex boyfriend.

Content Warnings and Extra Details

1. Nkásht íí by Darcie Little Badger

Details: urban fantasy, folklore, suspense, aromantic lead character, main platonic relationship between female characters. CW: minor characters deaths, accidents, the death of a child is mentioned, domestic abuse in flashbacks.

2. Hope for the Future by Elizabeth Barrette

Details: aroace male lead in a poly relationship with a female and male character, fantasy, story in poetry, happy ending. CW: arophobia and acephobia, family abandonment.

3. Tanith’s Sky by Penny Stirling

Details: fantasy, sci fi, drama, hurt/comfort. Main qp relationship between an aroace cis female lead and a non binary allo lead. The aroace lead is dead by the start of the story, which I had my hesitation about, but the story does a wonderful job capturing Tanith’s life in an aftermath of what would be another untold story, as well as Ash’s identity and their relationship, as well as the process of grief and moving forward. CW: major character death, grief, depression, transphobia, arophobia and acephobia.

4. And If The Body Were Not The Soul by A. C. Wise

Details: explicitly touch-averse asexual non binary lead, very likely aromantic (expressed but not named in the text), sci fi, social strife, hurt/comfort, found family and friendship (nb and cis female, nb and alien friendships). Many commenters have expressed that Ro is potentially an autistic character, some autistic authors and reviewers have agreed or disagreed but I couldn’t find whether the author stated that at any point. CW: mild depictions of violence, xenophobia, social issues and unrest, happy ending.

5. The Crows Her Dragon’s Gate by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Details: the goddess Xihe is depicted as aroace yet marries the god Di Jun for a time in which she lives troubled. Fantasy, mythology, re-interpretations, angst with a happy ending. CW: internalized acephobia and arophobia, dubious consent, violence, animal death, toxic marriage, there is a side wlw couple of mortals who die.

6. The Girl Turns West by Darcie Little Badger

Details: there isn’t romance in the story, the lead character doesn’t seemingly have romance in the future and there is a side female character who explicitly rejects suitors and prefers to live independently yet with her family. Considering that the author has written several aroace characters, I decided to include this one and another story in Part 2 as strong potentials (there is another story by the same author that other sites recommend as aro-representative, but I think these two are a lot less vague). Fantasy, mythology, folklore, bittersweet ending. CW: death mentions, wounds and accidents, blood mentions.

7. Kin, Painted by Penny Stirling

Details: poetic prose, fantasy, aromantic lead character, trans male character, non binary characters.

8. Cucumber by Penny Stirling

Details: fiction in poetry form, queerplatonic relationship in a fantasy setting. CW: arophobia and acephobia, social pressure.

9. The Famine King by Darcie Little Badger

Details: mystery, suspense, horror, folklore, hurt/comfort, angst w/optimistic ending, explicit non romantic & non sexual main relationship between to female characters. CW: blood, wounds, cannibalism mentions, mental illness with hallucination episodes, racism.

10. How My Best Friend Rania Crashed A Party And Saved The World by Ada Hoffman.

Details: high school setting, uplifting, sci fi, aroace lead character in a friendship with a heterosexual girl and a bisexual girl. CW: arophobia by the best friend, which is not confronted or discussed, mentions of racism. Notes: I read this story for the Pride list last year and I didn't include it because I had a bone to pick with Rania's character. The story is fun, a lot more lighthearted than many of the ones here and has a distinct tone that makes it good to include, plus Emma (the lead) is a very friendly, social and well-liked person, rather than the traditional robot/alien foil aro, ace and aroace characters tend to receive. So, even if I'm still uneasy about Rania and how her bad attitude is not acknowledged in the story, I’m still including it for all its perks.

11. Unlike Most Tides by Darcie Little Badger

Details: there is a protagonist who prefers to live in solitude and speaks about it and about her favorable feelings towards it. It isn’t explicitly stated that she is aromantic but, much like The Girl Turns West in Part 1, I’d say it’s a good addition to the list, though it's probably the least explicit of the bunch. Mystery, supernatural, sci fi, suspense, positive ending. CW: murder, corpses, side character death, blood, femicide.

Other masterposts:

@coolcurrybooks's first and second masterpost I consulted

Penny Stirling's recommendation list

LGBTQReads recommendations list

Claudie Arsenault recommendation list

Aro and Ace character database

Aroaessidhe recommendations list

YA Pride masterlist

My own LGBTQ+ free short stories rec list from last year, some of these stories are in it but the majority is not

[swamp-world]

And another thing: TERFs will, consistently, throw progressive movements under the bus not just because of transphobia, but plain and simply because of hatred for men. And I am, frankly, not going to use the term "radical feminist" for these people instead of TERF, because while on the surface it may seem like their hatred for men has nothing to do with their transphobia, that we should keep their transphobia separate from the rest, it is literally impossible to do so. I am saying this as a former TERF. You cannot separate their hatred for trans women, their "concern" for trans men, their fear of "erasure of lesbians", or their dislike of gay men, their position on sex work and sex buyers, their glorification of mothers at all cost and incessant vilification of all fathers no matter what. These things are all deeply and inextricably related.

And so you will see TERFs pull up old anti-abolitionist talking points about how prison reform is not viable, about how there is no acceptable punishment for rape and femicide, how they truly do deserve to be locked up for life or outright executed, and how they will never never never support prison reform because it "throws women under the bus". In the same breath they will turn around and talk about the violence that "trans identified males" (I.e. trans women, but of course we can't respect that) bring into women's prisons, the sexual assault of female guards in male prisons, the male violence inherent in male prisons. There isn't one mention of violence in women's prisons when it is committed by afab people, only by trans women.

They will talk loudly and vocally about the lack of attention in the justice system to violence against women, to sexual assault cases, to the way that police officers abuse sex workers and vulnerable women and ignore domestic violence. And immediately after, they will write thinkpieces based on copaganda films, saying "imagine if ACAB leftists had their way and got rid of the cops, then there would be no one to help these (fictional) sex workers" as if they completely forgot everything they said about violence against real sex workers.

At the core of TERF ideology is a fundamental belief that people are not able to change. This is what makes them so susceptible to reactionary ideology and propaganda, and why they work so adjacenctly to other reactionary movements. They believe, fundamentally, that AMAB people are inherently violent, that they cannot change, that all AMAB people are violent without exception, and instead of trying to change the world that we live in, or the circumstances of our society and culture that influence male violence and female victimhood, they opt for segregation. They choose biological essentialism. They choose political lesbianism. They choose female separatism from society as a whole.

TERFs hate men. They adore women. They see the world along these rigid lines, and trans people threaten that understanding, and do not fit into their solution through separation. And progressive solutions that don't involve that separation and segregation? TERFs see those as being equally bad.

[boobie-fem-x]

What made you want to be a radical feminist ? I don’t come to hate, I’m just curious

well, before i start ill say i dont really consider myself a radfem, just rad leaning and im still learning. but I used to be very active in TRA circles, on my old blog id regularly argue with radfems, etc. I even used to ID as ftm, and i was binding to the point of causing rib damage and everything.

I think I started with hatereading menalez’s blog after one of my friends got in an argument with her and I remembered thinking “well she isn’t so bad” and i started reading other radfem blogs and realizing they actually made a lot of sense and weren’t as horribly misogynistic and transphobic as all my friends were saying.

And then once you start reading you start noticing and you can’t stop. all around me i noticed trans people got special treatment, they got laws passed faster than any lgb person could hope for, and their opinions were automatically more important than a woman’s. and woman still are treated like subhuman- the way my teachers and coaches speak to me vs the boys in my class, the way my parents buy my younger male cousins toys and things they can move and play in, but buy my little sister makeup to play with and tell her not to go play outside, she’ll get her dress dirty. and this isn’t even mentioning how women are treated in other countries! think about the fgm, femicide, it’s legal to beat and rape your wife, child marriages, etc. and all of it is caused by men. and every man i know is shitty to some degree.

all liberal feminism seems to do is tell women its okay for them to do exactly what the patriarchy wants, and it doesnt help any western women let alone women in other places who have it a thousand times worse.

[papirouge]

I think you mentioned you were French a while back? Do you know anything about the Feminist Collective in France being accused of transphobia for reporting femicides? And being told to stop reporting femicides at all. I did and I'm going????? Theres been 0 trans women murdered by partners in the past 5 years while over 100 women were by their male partners/exes just last year...??? Why arent women waking up and realizing how misogynistic being told to stop talking about women being killed by men is??? I'm just so lost

Yeah I'm French! France is actually super based when it comes to feminist defending women's right and keeping up the good fight. There are several collective raising up awareness about femicide and sexual harassment, especially in the entertainment industry. And they're no to be messed with 💀 Never forget that's how they welcomed Polanski during the last César ceremony (the equivalent of the Oscars in France) 💀:

There's been accusations of transphobia drama between some feminist organizations, but they are quite niche, and for the time being, trans exclusive feminism is still the standard here. Trans are literally non-existent around here (although they're really trying hard to shove that agenda onto the grand public) and most French people are totally oblivious to the trans agenda unlike a bunch of countries abroad such as the US, Canada, or even the U.K (which is just next door). It's not rare to find anti surrogacy ads in the street of Paris (here's a post about it I made a few months ago) which is super based imo

Southern Europe as a whole is resisting much more to the whole trans thing. You'll hardly see the trans lobby making bold moves in France, Italia, Portugal or Spain like they can in the UK or Northwest Europe. Truly the most based European countries lol

[shirlleycoyle]

Why The Guardian Censored Judith Butler on TERFs

On Tuesday, the Guardian published an interview with the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, which included a scathing critique of so-called “gender critical” transphobes and trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who don’t believe trans women are women, and oppose the right of transgender people to exist in gendered spaces, such as a bathrooms.

“The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times,” Butler said. “So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.”

Hours later, this section of the article, including a question from the interviewer Jules Gleeson and three paragraphs from Butler, were removed. The only explanation is a cryptic note at the end of the article, stating: “This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place.” Screenshots of the deleted section of the interview have gone viral on Twitter.

According to Gleeson, who provided Motherboard with a written statement, the Guardian’s editorial team, and in particular its team based in the UK, “folded” under pressure from readers who took issue with the article and decided to “censor” Butler. The Guardian did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Habitual bigots online are going to do their thing, and usually respond to pieces without even reading them,” Gleeson wrote in a statement sent to Motherboard. “What’s been more unexpected was how quickly the publication folded. I was expecting the Guardian US to stand by me as a writer, and while I have received apologies from their side, this has been a draining and consuming episode that I didn’t expect.”

Gleeson told Motherboard that Judith Butler has also emailed the Guardian about its decision to remove that section of the interview, but has not heard back.

Gleeson said she last heard from the Guardian last night, and that her editor said “there’s not much I can do” because a decision has already been made. 

“I have not encountered anything like this,” Gleeson said of the Guardian’s decision. “A few people I’ve spoken to, including at the Guardian US, said this is unprecedented.” 

According to Gleeson, within a few hours of the Guardian publishing interview, she was forwarded a message from the Guardian’s “reader complaints” department. According to Gleeson, and responses that were critical of the interview on social media, the issue was not in what Butler said, but how Gleeson asked the question. 

In the original article, Gleeson asked: “It seems that some within feminist movements are becoming sympathetic to these far-right campaigns. This year’s furore around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobes followed by bloody protests organised by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?”

The Wi Spa incident Gleeson was referring to started as a viral video of a woman at a spa in Los Angeles complaining that she saw someone’s penis in an area of the spa intended for women only. As the Guardian itself wrote on July 28, “The massive media attention resulted in two weekends of chaotic rallies in LA this month, in which anti-trans and trans-rights protesters fought in the streets, and women carrying ‘protect female spaces’ signs paraded alongside members of the far-right Proud Boys.”

The problem, as some readers said and the Guardian’s editors apparently agreed, was that the question didn’t mention that, last week, the Los Angeles Police Department charged the person who was the subject of that video for indecent exposure. There is an arrest warrant for the 52-year-old, who is now facing five felony counts, according to court records reviewed by Motherboard. According to the police, this person has been a registered sex offender since 2006 and has a history of indecent exposure charges. 

“I was of two minds about mentioning Wi Spa, as at this point it mostly seemed like a Pizzagate style conspiracy: starting online without clear sourcing, then spilling into IRL violence (including Proud Boys stabbing antifa counter-protestors, and at one point even each other),” Gleeson said.

As Gleeson notes, news of the arrest warrant does not negate her description of the incident as a “furore” which is largely fueled by “Gender Critical” activists and the far-right. The Guardian covered this fallout as well.

“However with all this said, I can see why the new developments took Wi Spa from a weak example to a counter-productive one,” Gleeson said. 

Gleeson said that while the piece initially received glowing feedback, the criticism from some readers escalated “‘up the chain’ of Guardian editorial hierarchy (and out of Guardian US control). Apparently it became something of an editor’s pile on, with a ‘long discussion’ that I didn’t get to see unfolding.”

Gleeson suggested to retract the question and replace it with something more timely, like the recent Texas abortion law. She offered the following revision, “free of charge:” 

It seems that some within feminist movements are becoming sympathetic to these far-right campaigns. In 2019 NBC news reported that the US right wing lobbying group The Heritage Foundation had hosted 'gender critical' feminist perspectives. Remarkable given the Heritage Foundation is pushing for restrictions on abortion, as seen in Texas.

“I explained that while I wasn’t attached to my question, and was happy for that to get revised or removed, I could not endorse removing Judith Butler’s answer,” Gleeson said. “Unfortunately, the Guardian editors decided to go ahead with their decision to censor Judith Butler.”

It is exceedingly rare for long passages to be cut from articles with such a cryptic update note, and is even rarer for a question-and-answer to be deleted from a high profile interview without any real explanation to readers. 

“I'm not uncompromising here, I informed your editors that my question was flexible, but Judith's answer was essential,” Gleeson said in an email to John Mulholland, editor of the Guardian US. “To me it seems perfectly clear that the 'gender critics' should not be beyond criticism, any more than the rest of the 'anti-gender' movement. And no discussion of the topic today can ignore them.”

Judith Butler did not respond to a request for comment. 

Gleeson said that she expected publishing an interview with Judith Butler at the Guardian would be a “live wire” given the Guardian UK’s “editorial stance” on trans issue and Judith Butler specifically. Gleeson notes that the Guardian’s US editorial team has taken issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK. She also notes the Guardian regularly publishes editorials that are critical of Butler. 

“Thirty years ago, academics were all high on Jacques Derrida. Now a lot of them appear to be drinking the Kool-Aid that is Judith Butler, high priestess of gender theory,” Rachel Cooke wrote in a Guardian story last month, for example. 

“My impression is that there are two different teams, the U.S. team and the UK team,” Gleeson told Motherboard. “I know it’s not a totally different publication, but I expected some editorial autonomy from the U.S., which simply was not there.”

“I’m loath to make an appeal to our identities at this point, but it seems a fine state of affairs when an intersex woman interviewing one of the few non-binary philosophy professors in the world is decried online as ‘misogyny,’” Gleeson said. “One last question for the editorial teams at The Guardian: why should 'Gender Critics' be beyond criticism?”

Why The Guardian Censored Judith Butler on TERFs syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[4thworldfeminism]

Ni Una Menos: What America can learn from the Latin American feminist movement

According to The New York Times, “the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California released a study on Monday that found that of the 100 top-grossing films each year from 2007 to 2018, only three percent featured Latino actors in lead co-lead roles” (Holson, 2019.) Additionally, producers and casting executives also only made up 3%, and directors only made up 4% across a 12-year period (Holson, 2019). In total, only 4.5% of speaking roles in the sample were played by Latino actors (Holson, 2019). The representations that do exist often are inaccurate, racist, and sexist. Latina women are often represented as “maids, housekeepers and nannies,” usually playing “submissive and obedient women who can do anything for their families and jobs” (Lopez, 2013). 

“Rita Moreno, the first Latina to win an oscar,” said that she was limited in the roles she was offered, being given the “little senorita Lolita, conchita Lolita kind of spitfire roles, everything but an American girl. I was the utilitarian ethnic” (Andrews, 2017). These stereotypes that normalize Latinas’ “sexual desirability, proficiency, and availability,” work to infantalize, sexualize, and racialize bodies “linked to conquest, difference, and disembodiment” (Hinojos, 2019). These all have serious effects on the Latinx community and their identities. Maria Hinojosa, a famous journalist, said she “grew up feeling invisible,” which led her to founding Futuro Media, a “nonprofit organization with the goal of producing content from a people-of-color perspective” (Reyes, 2020). According to Gina Rodriguez, an American actress, she “missed out on learning perfect Spanish because Latinos weren’t the ‘good guys’ on-screen, so god forbid anyone thought that way of me. My parents feared we would be discriminated against so they taught us English first” (Shinn-Morris, n.d.).

These representations are not only untrue, but they also contribute further to the hypersexualization of Latina bodies and violence against Latina women. By dehumanizing Latina women and reducing them to sexual conquests or subservient buffoons, these mass media stereotypes bolster America’s xenophobic and racist policies toward the Latinx community. Meanwhile, Latina women are fighting for their very lives. While many women are rallying in the United States against inhumane detention and deportation policies, one of the greatest counterexamples to the long list of media stereotypes of Latina women is the Ni Una Menos movement in Latin America.

Ni una menos means not one less in Spanish. It’s a shortened version of the phrase “Ni una menos, ni una mas!” which translates to “not one woman less, not one more death!” (Friedman & Tabbush, 2016). The line has become the rallying cry of massive protests against femicide, or the killing of women because of their gender, in Argentina and, increasingly, the rest of Latin America. In 2015, in response to a slew of femicide cases, hundreds of thousands of women across Argentina organized and executed incredible protests with unprecedented participation, marching to the congress in the capital city of Bueno Aires (Pomaraniec, 2015). In 2016, in reaction to the violent abduction and gang-rape of Lucía Pérez, a 16-year-old high school student, feminist activists organized both a strike and protest in less than a week(Friedman & Tabbush, 2016). For the past five years, the movement has grown to include other issues and has reached other countries in Latin America, such as Mexico, which recently saw countless women participate in a massive women’s strike and march on and following International Women’s Day (Gonzalez, 2020).

These demonstrations show the incredible organizing power of Latina women and their capacity to drive social and legislative change, contrary to what the images of the “sexy maid” or “spicy (but stupid) Latina” suggest. In Chile, the demonstrations “were central to the Chilean feminist movement’s accumulation of power,” working to “narrate shared suffering, question adversaries, and democratize the field of political visibility” (Martinez, 2019). According to Mason W. Moseley, author of Protest State: The Rise of Everyday Contention in Latin America, the Ni Una Menos movement has been so powerful in Argentina that it has “typified the nature of the Argentine protest state” (Moseley, 2018). Meanwhile, the United States actually has a higher rate of femicides - from 2010-2015, Argentina registered fewer femicides per 100,000 women than the United States (Moseley, 2018).  That said, it is important to note that the stereotypes perpetuated by American mass media are not only proven false (in dramatic fashion) by the Ni Una Menos movement, but also that these stereotypes simply continue to reinforce the very violence that the movement seeks to end. Furthermore, the lack of American reporting on the movement contributes to the erasure of Latinx activism and Latina agency.  

What Ni Una Menos also points out is that there is a severe underreporting of femicides in the United States, which lacks a definition for the word “femicide,” unlike many of the Latin American countries mentioned above (Anguiano, 2019). Even as I was researching this topic, I struggled to find information on American femicides - my “femicide” searches in the University Library portals returned only “homicide,” not even recognizing the terms I was using. This may be because the United States only tracks and registers domestic violence killings as gender-related homicides, which means there is a massive gap in American data on femicides - and these murders are risks to all women in America, not only the Latinx community (Anguiano, 2019). The rate for murdered trans women is even higher, despite still being underreported (Human Rights Campaign, 2019). Given the severity of this invisible “epidemic,” the American media would do well to pay greater attention to the model that Ni Una Menos sets and reexamine its standard reporting and depictions of Latina women.

Citations:

Andrews, K. (2017, May 1). (Mis)Representation of Latinos in Media. Retrieved from https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/art-and-culture/misrepresentation-latinos-media** **

Anguiano, D. (2019, April 11). The nurse tracking America’s ‘epidemic’ of murdered women. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/11/the-nurse-tracking-americas-epidemic-of-murdered-women

 Hinojos, S. (2019). Lupe Vélez and her spicy visual “accent” in English-language print media. Latino Studies, 17(3), 338–361. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-019-00194-y

Holson, L. M. (2019, August 26). Latinos Are Underrepresented in Hollywood, Study Finds. Retrieved April, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/movies/latinos-hollywood-underrepresented.html

Human Rights Campaign. (2019). Violence Against the Transgender Community in 2019. Retrieved from https://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-transgender-community-in-2019

 Lopez, J. (2013). Speaking with them or speaking for them: A conversation about the effect of stereotypes in the Latina/Hispanic women’s experiences in the United States. New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 25(2), 99–106. https://doi.org/10.1002/nha.20020

 Martínez, S. (2019). Contributions to an ethnography of feminist movements: Expressive recourses in the #Ni una menos and #8M marches in Santiago de Chile. Antipoda, 2019(35), 115–124. https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda35.2019.06

 Moseley, M. (2018). Tracing the Roots of the Protest State in Argentina. In Protest State. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190694005.003.0005

Reyes, R. A. (2020, April 6). Love and hate in our America: Journalist Maria Hinojosa talks about both in upcoming memoir. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/love-hate-our-america-journalist-maria-hinojosa-talks-about-both-n1177616